The Importance of Finding the Best Play in Backgammon

It’s pretty obvious that those two checkers back on your opponent’s 1 point need to move…if you get stuck back there, you’re done for, and the 3-3 is one of the only two rolls (6-6 being the other) that allow you to move up without leaving blots. So it’s a no-brainer that we need to move those back checkers. 

My opponent got carried away, however, and moved those two checkers all the way out to his opponent’s bar point. That’s not a bad play, in fact, it’s a pretty decent play and puts Black in a far better position than he was before the roll. 

In backgammon, however, the most important thing, if you want to win consistently, is not to find a “good” play, but to find the “best” play. Often we have a roll where we can make a pretty good move. In this case, moving out to the 18 point (opponent’s bar point) is pretty good—in fact, after that move Black becomes a 58% favorite to win the game (according to Snowie, the computer program).

But a better play is to bring the two back checkers up to the 4 point and hit the checker on the 1 point, making the point. If Black makes that play, instead of being a 58% favorite to win the game, Snowie tells us he is a 61% favorite. An additional 3% doesn’t sound like much, but actually, that’s quite a bit of gain in advantage for just one roll. Think about how your game is affected if you gain just 3% on every play! 

Remember I said how important it is to find the “best” play? Well, that applies here very well, because there is an even better play than coming up and making the ace point, and that is coming up with the two back checkers and making your 5 point. According to our friendly backgammon computer, Snowie, if you make that play you are a 67% favorite to win the game…far better than the other two plays. The Snowie evaluation is below for your reference.

To backgammon experts, it’s not enough just to know which play increases your odds, it is far more important to understand why one play is better than the rest. If you know the odds only, it won’t really help you in the long run, because you cannot possibly remember every play in every situation and the odds. But if you learn why a play is best, and you can understand some “general principles” or what I call “rules of thumb” that apply, you are more likely to make the right play in the future if the same or a similar situation comes up again.

Backgammon Rule of Thumb

Move up your back checkers or you will get stuck, and if you get a chance to move both checkers up at once without leaving a shot, you probably should take advantage of that roll. That unless you are so far down in the race that your only reasonable chance to win is to stay back and wait for a shot. In this situation, the race is close, and you stand a far better chance to win the race by moving up. Also, by moving up to your opponent’s 4-point, you are not entirely giving up on getting a shot. 

Now we can look at the other side of the board and decide if there is something better than keeping those back checkers going. We know that hitting and making another point in our board is generally a good thing, so that is why it is easy to see that making the 1-point is probably better than continuing the back checkers. 

But we also know that our 5-point is called “the golden point” for a reason…generally, it’s the most important point we can make as long as our opponent still has checkers in our inner board and so long as there is still the possibility for future hitting. 

To make the final decision, I had to actually make all three moves and look at them and decide what “looked better” in terms of what was likely to happen after this roll. I saw that if I made my opponent’s bar point it would be very difficult to advance those checkers further without leaving a blot. I saw that if I hit my opponent off my 1-point he could still come in on the 2, 3, or 5 point, and probably make one of those points, and then the 2 checkers on my 1-point were pretty much “out of play.”

And when I saw what it looked like to make my 5-point I saw that almost no matter what my opponent rolls, none of my checkers are out of play and it’s going to be very difficult for him to advance his checkers safely. 

If you play chess, you know that once you make a move it has to stay there, but in backgammon, we are able to make a move and look at it, and as long as we haven’t picked up the dice, we can change the move. In complicated situations like this, I always look at the various options and then make my final decision. It might help you to do the same when you’re playing backgammon.